Where The Time Went

I haven't been lost.  I've been sitting beside a home made transceiver trying to reach a ship in the vicinity.  I've been on board it a few times with no signs of life.  Each time I return to my junker it goes off and I race to the comms deck to respond.  Each time I do- static.

Each time I board it there are freshly opened meals, a coffee sack still warm, a cigarette drifting with flecks of ash still floating and clouds of smoke swaying in the recycled air.  A saucer and chipped cup and different music playing in the background over the public address.  Breathable 65 degree air.  A few playing cards that weren't there before.  A display still picking up signals from Sol from 1989 when they aren't playing static.  A ghost ship.  I turn off the distress beacon and return to my junker to figure out what to do with it.

I can't turn it over to the scrappers just yet.  Not with people aboard.  Their machines will shred it with no regard for souls.  If someone is on that ship, I can't forgive myself.  If someone is on that ship, I hope to make contact soon.  The trade hub orbiting Europa is still four days journey from our position in the Oort.  Remember how lovely the grass was down on Terra?  If I can bring this thing back in one piece, there'll be a fortune and a vacation waiting for us.

Someone is on that ship.  I will find them.

Captain Jexel Hobbes of the Noway Accel- 10201800278

Time has flown by.  I've missed so many deadlines I wanted to hit.  When was the last time we spoke?

RAM is going to take a serious investment.  I know that the mother board can handle it and I've tried a half dozen times different combinations of chips to blow it to the 16 gigabytes that it can do.  I've allowed the bottleneck to become a road block on producing art.  I fell in love back in March.  Sacrificing and sacrificing over and over to try to bring another person into my world, but most efforts have failed.

I've asked her dozens, but not yet hundreds of times to meet me half way.  She continues to do the same things she does, not because she doesn't love me as much as I love her, but because it is all she knows and has known since she was small.  I do think that it's possible to change, I know it is.  Everyone deserves a chance.  There is a spark in her.  If I can help, I will.  I didn't get to where I am in life without help.  How can a person conscious of this turn away another and another who actually kind of sort of understands you?

I am beginning to wonder if she actually does or if she is a part of my life because I am so different from everything she once knew and cares more about being truly loved as a person than.......  she does love fairly unconditionally.  Maybe that's a part of the problem.  She can't tell the difference between someone who actually cares for her and someone who is using her.  It's a possibility.  It can be solved.

How do you speak to someone who is jammed with ultimatums and unwilling to discern?  How do you speak to someone who cannot see the consequences of their actions beyond a week, beyond a month, beyond 12 hours?  How do you reach an addict?  I am one.  She's not on another level.  She hasn't allowed herself into the terrors of introspection.

She flies away from the heat.  She creates reason mazes.  Responsibility mazes.  Agency dead falls.  I understand the fear.  How can you explain that fear in your own life to someone who hasn't acknowledged it within their own space?  I suppose that goes back to the old adage: how can you love someone, if you cannot love yourself.  I don't know what to do when I see her setting herself up for apologies.  It's how she's gotten by.  The other adage: don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness.

I never thought that I would fall in love again.  I knew I would.  I did not believe, however, that it would be more than a passing fancy.  Survival is paramount.  Survival comes with its costs.  One of the costs is you do not get to enjoy stable long term relationships because you must survive.  If two survivors meet, there's a match and a stable long term relationship can grow there because there is no dependence.  There is only a mutual companionship.  Do not tell me you would die for me.  Live with me.

I am afraid this will not work and I may have to eject her through an escape pod into the vacuum of space with a few months survival kit, a beacon, and a radio.

The largest red flag wasn't history, or family composition, or addiction.  The largest red flag remains a dearth of creative thought.  A nagging inability to see what's possible instead of what's here.

One year.  One year.  I will gift her one year of my life.  I was given less to reach further and, for some of it, I destructed because I didn't know what and who I was and a heavy portion was out of my control from the outset.  Everyone deserves a chance to grow.  Everyone!  I know she can do it.  We have so much in common and beautifully so.  I do love her after believing that I did not have the capacity to love again after everything my circuits have been sheared through.  I am a part of my ship, incorporated, built, and breathing, designed, redesigned, scrapped, prototyped, burned, and rebuilt anew.

The larger mission is still to build a map for the sojourners after I am long gone and someone else is stumbling upon my space station and docked junker broadcasting songs no one has heard in decades and curious what the hell a space station is doing 15 light years away from Sol in dead space.

I have compassion.  I know that I am a pretty tough ticket 300 out of 365 days, but I can feel and I can be and am conscious of my bipolar schizophrenia.   Occasionally it gets away from me, but not nearly as often as it once did.  I can protect her and my friends from it (it's impossible to protect one's self).

One year from the day we met in March.

Synchronize watches.




///Way Out West - "Northern Lights"   radiata

Gauging

I hate being an orphan.  Holidays, so many of them are a myth.  I wish there was a setting on the dial between killing them and existing.  I would suppose you must embrace the indecision each and every day.  24 hours at a time; side by each.




///Beach House - Space Song ~ however lovely it would be to staple their skin to the walls of your domicile, it will never work.  Fantasia will.  Wait.

An Evening With A Friend and Learning What Depression Is

Sitting on a cup cushion chair and listening to.  Days later I understand that.  I understand better that my schizophrenia will run parallel to depression at points and expecting some sort of  bipolar snap to happen and coming back to them to poke them with a "what's wrong" is no way forward.  That's not how it works.  Not even close.  Shadow mimicry.

I have wondered the best way of going about describing the it that governs me.  Is this what you want?  Locked.  Tell me now!  I am afraid that if I do I will be interned again.  I feel small.  I feel frightened.  What is wrong with us?  I want to be bipolar.  I want to be depressed.  I want to be something else without lying about what I am.  Why can't it be that way?  I feel like garbage saying that, knowing the tolls of those pains from meeting them.  The pissing contest cesspool.  The grass is always greener.  Fukkoff.  Listening to each word and understanding dawning, the same loathing and disappointment and anger that froths inside me frothed and boils inside them too (in different ways); similar hiding places and outdoor faces are incorporated to further life.  The panic attacks are the same.

Whenever I talk about it, be the occasion among friends or sibs or to you, I immediately feel defective.  A waste of your time.  How is it you've navigated 32 years of life [28 of them with knowing enough junk to not get run over by a thing called a car out of pure ignorance (22 of them with knowing enough junk to not get run over by a thing called a car out of negligence)] and still fight with normality?  Well, if I knew, I'd put an end to it.

What we are does not need vivisection to be confirmed.  The most frustrating part is being forced to bridge gaps and justify my misgivings and "quirks."

Reality checks and tests.  I don't understand.  Negative!  Negative!  Negative!  Through study, I know how people are supposed to feel when things happen.  That's why I enjoy semaphore so much.  It helps me feel like I am a person too, regardless of what actually is.

Undamaged or compromised, I envy the feeling and find their company saturated and wonderful.  It is selfish.  It is not selfish.  Listening to a good friend helped me learn what actual depression is and what it costs each day.  Listening to a good friend helped me learn the gender multiplier and its complications and callousness.  Between light hearted turns of phrase and spikes of imagination, I grew to understand the true differences between us and I learned more than I ever thought I'd need to know about what that prison is like.  I hope I expressed what the view from inside my bars looks like too.

I am so glad I have the chance to compose this.  I'll try and encapsulate it in a more condensed form:

I try to only project positive.  No I don't LOL.  Can shoot that down in a heartbeat.  I must laugh out loud.  I cannot set the world on fire.  I certainly, however, do not try to project only positive.  The dives are there for the asking.  I do not suffer in silence.  My physical pain tolerance has not kept pace with my mental pain tolerance and that's okay.  I enjoy listening.  It helps me feel more safe and more sane.

I am running.

I am afraid.

The dissimilarities are glaring now.  Punishing heft of ocean swell.  A fair mistake to make?  In speaking with her, traveling the star systems made wonderful sense.  Collapsing interpersonal nonsense into two dimensions, we existed and could map one another in three.  It's kind of weird, bare with me.  Here we go:

For some time, several months, I'd convinced myself I was predominantly bipolar.  Cycling on and off and on and off in stints.  If I could just figure out the timing, I could use it to approach "normal".  Ride with it.  Go with it.  Do not fight it.  Above all, do not try to force the head spaces function and be aware of its gear before you interact with anyone.  I charted up many conversations about mania and engaged in shared tales of its absence in attempts to better understand its dimensions and myself and the loved ones I was engaging with.

Along those veins it became clearer and clearer that I did not know what I thought I knew about them.  What I thought I knew about her.   What I thought I knew about him.  Some beliefs stood pat, many were restructured.  Some were reinforced.  I am susceptible to a high and low line, but the thread that flows through all points on the chart is my schizophrenia.  The simplest and most base way to gauge who I am underneath the layer of my consciousness and awareness is that.  My "it." For her, it is depression.  The hard coded piece of yourself that can not be changed.  That I enjoyed the most about speaking with her is laughing about everyday bullshit.  Seeing the ledge and taking casual portraits for one-another at the edge of the world.  I've known highs and I've known lows, but I've never had to know the tar ocean depression.  I've been and am manic, I've been and am depressed, truth be tolled, I am just schizophrenic. The fabulous shock of the reminder that you are just as much and deserving to be part of the human race as the "normals" is a spark.

I am glad that our worlds have collided.  I will attempt to boil this down later.  I don't have to do this alone.

We are.

We still don't know what our conversion rate is.  We still have no explanation for why we burn so violently and brilliantly and sleeplessly and the only consolation is watching the sun cross the horizon line and light up the atmosphere like a pool of gasoline and scream and sing and howl to it from the highest ground we can find, should we be caught outdoors.  I don't know why.

We are.

I want to heal.  I want to burn. I am understanding depression with greater accuracy than I ever have before.  I am understanding a new kind of helplessness that I've never sensed before in its entirety.  Seeing more of its true scope is deafening and tuning at once.




///there is no replacement for spending time and sharing experience.   The world will never be ready for the damaged.  Us damaged don't have to fight world war prime alone, though.   You do not have to either.  You don't have to either.  Don't understand; do listen.

///El-P & Killer Mike - "Legend Has It"

The Ethos of The Project

As projects continue to mount up incomplete the motor pool continues to grow.  The airfield continues to sprawl.  The docks, the compounds, the factories, the underground sites, the developers, the researchers, the caf staff, the janitors, the resource department, the policing, the eateries, the sourcing, the contractors, the licensing, it all sprawls and becomes their own cities.  Their own threaded lives to live each birth to death.  Transportation hubs and power grids.  Interlaced reasons and reasoning.

All of them existing in suspended animation.  Adjusting a blade of grass here.  Striking a cloud there.  Moving the sun a few degrees and running over every detail on that continent's sunsetting side.  Moving the sun a few degrees back and seeing it again for reference before putting it back where it was and tilting its axis a half degree so the flock of early evening moths make a little more sense.  I want to live in them in a universe of suspended animation.  I have to finish them.  As you work on them and take on new ones that universe reaches higher and higher resolutions and once they cross into the realized that's the end.

The generator stops and something new exists.  The snow globe must collapse.  The means must see their end.  Everything that was in there is now in there.  I can't keep joyriding through the suspended animation universe.   It's time for them to go.  Time to take apart the cities that sprang up around them.  There'll be other cities to build and populate.  I tell myself "it'll be fun."




///Nina Simone - "Feeling Good (Bassnectar Remix)"

Return Of The Painted Dinosaur (New Limit)

To say that it is difficult to talk about is true.  Not an overstatement, not an understatement.  The wounds still feel like they happened in a dream.  When I wake up I feel like I am going to wake up again as soon as start to move my limbs, and I do not.  I wake up once and look at my hand and wrist and wiggle my fingertips and hold it up over my face and pinch myself and poke my eyebrows and sniff it and it is mine.  Check after check comes back positive.  "This belongs to you."  There was not a mistake.  There was not a swap of body parts while you were sleeping.  You are awake.  You are breathing.  The nerves are speaking to each other as they should.  Motor functions have all checked out.  You are indeed occupying the body you went to bed in.  Further damage has ceased.  Necrosis is staved off.  Healing has also ceased.  It is not going to get better or return to mint, though it will also not get worse.  Wake up.  Get up.

Some days I wake up, since it happened, and I scream into my pillow for long pillows for long minutes.  Pound my fists on the mattress.  Cry until I am exhausted.  And then get up and head to the shower, not to take one, but to get the bandages on my leg wet enough to peel off the still reforming skin without damaging it or tearing it because no matter how non-stick bandages claim to be, they will fuse with your newly regenerated skin and tear it off like a fine gossamer contacted with Velcro if you are not careful.  If you stub your toe or brush your shin against a coffee table corner or bump against a chair leg, that newly formed skin will peel free like over ripe peach fuzz and the healing has to begin all over again.

I've wanted to brand myself for some time.  A change of pace between scarification stints and a way to get a different look as I work on tattooing myself to help me mark time between the many different iterations of myself and stages of my life.  The pain brings an acute awareness that helps me cut through the storm swells and confusion and voices and whorls and weirs of manic depression and schizophrenia.  When your nerves are screaming out at you, it can drown out the noise.  When you can touch something concrete and constant it becomes a reference stone and constant reminder of your human elements, your and everyone else's pains and joys and emotional lives.  It allows you to access a reality that opens doors of sympathy and empathy you otherwise would not be able to see or understand.   It clear cuts a path to direct needs and functions.  In small doses, that pain is invaluable and a joy with incredible utility.  In large doses it is a nightmare.

When the deep fryer began to fall over, time did not slow down.  I knew my two cats, rescued from negligent homes some years ago, were both in my efficiency kitchen with me, waiting for me to toss a little food on the floor for them to nose and paw, maybe eat, maybe pass on.  The fryer was in the same space it'd occupied since I bought it and first began using it.  Hundreds of times.  This time, whatever balance struck that slowly shifted through the years made its final move.  It began to fall, my cats looking up at me, and I threw my hands out at full speed to stop it.  From all of the previous times I'd dropped bowls, or a bucket slipped off of a shelf while I was filling it, I knew the cats wouldn't move until it hit the floor and I didn't have time to try to scare them out of the splash radius with words.  The speech centers of my brain were an afterthought.  All I could engage was "protect them!"

Weeks later I can understand why.  I can't afford to take them to a veterinarian to treat them long term for hot oil burns, especially what would likely have been second to third degree burns over 50% or more of their little bodies.  I would have had to put them down or take them to a vet to have them do it.  The whiff, the scent, the lightest breeze of a notion of having to mercy kill them was enough to send me into action because they are two of my mates.  My family in my outpost here in Pittsburgh as I build a life for myself, a single early thirties male permanently estranged from all family save for my immediate siblings, and even they not all as close as siblings are often assumed to be.  They mean the world to me, no matter how often I bellyache about them keeping me up all night with their little paw paw games and wrestling with my feet and ankles with a little too much claw now and then.  They're my shipmates that take care of the place while I am away and while I'm hurtling through the universe, trying to make sense of other people, and maybe stumble upon someone or ones to accompany me, in my hodgepodge, homemade, Tardis.  My companions.

I lunged and the fryer moved along the shelf and slammed against the wall and 367 degree oil rolled up its side like water in a blender.  Below, the skitter scratch of cat claws scrambling against floor boards reached my ears, my leading foot planted against the plastic tile to balance me.  Relief washed over me knowing "they will be safe" as the sheet of amber oil hanging in the air began its descent over where the fryer basin used to be.  Where my hands now were.

I snatched my left hand backward, my right still connected to the arm putting as much force as possible into the basin, now against the wall to drive my body backward.  The oil sloshed over my right hand and, knowing I could not withdraw it without allowing the entireity of my torso to fall into the shower and shelf and further shake the ball of solar flare to catch the rest of its contents on my face, I pushed back and took a shower against the skin's hand.

The thump and tumble of my cats running away collided with the immediate shock of hot oil across my hand and wrist and once my body began traveling backward, the oil beginning to slap and clap against the floor, I began to raise my leg against the back splash.  What splashed and dotted my left leg cooled enough as it dotted my pants to leave no mark.  What landed in the bin turned around its base like a tsunamic rip tide, crushed against the basin's rear wall, curled around as sport, cameras flashing, snap, and teeth bared came for me.

Balanced, I tore my right hand away, the curling aftershock cresting.  It spilled.  The wave covered my knee and washed my shin and right foot and that was when a scream cut loose.  I cried out.  Prime and howl.  I screamed to the skies as the last of it dribbled off of my toes.

The deep fryer, spun with the terror of my flash fried hand, fell backward and spilled the rest of its contents to the floor that I, loosed from protecting cats and certain further was easily, by miles, too far, could leap clear and land against the kitchen sink.  I breathed hard for wasted minutes in a mental gridlock, hips perched on the lip of the kitchen sink, before I ran to the bathroom.

The cold water was turned to its maximum setting with the tub to shower knob turned to full shower.  Water washed all over me and I held my paw up to the chill spray and only brought it down to rinse over every other part of the right side of my body that was vibrating at death levels.  Sometimes when I lose my temper and cannot corral it I will fire off a punch into an inanimate object to pop off steam and that tingle returned is that tingle that tells you every part of your skin that was between flesh and bone and the rock and the hard place you found yourself in to bring ya to a point where the only release was the flood of endorphin and whatever other enzymes cover up disappointment and rage has died and maybe given up a fragment of solace to the rest of the mad house.  That tingle, rushing over the right side of my body and the nerves shouting out for soft words brought me back to the point where I understood I could not put enough cold water on every part of me that needed it.

My leg continued to burn.  For hours afterward.  I was able to wash my arm in enough cold water, enough of it falling into the tub, as it scattered from the shower's head against my hand, to cool my foot.  Second degree burns, superficial as superficial second degree burns can be, set in on my arm and foot as second degree burns ate into my leg, starved of cool.

I got out of the shower and pat dried myself.

Skin came off in palm sized chunks.

It stuck to the towel.

I got back in the shower.

Skin clogged the drain.

I cried.  I grabbed a bar of soap and rubbed.  More skin came loose.  It stuck to the walls of the shower.  It stuck to my own face.  It caught in my chest hair and groin.  Tendrils drifted from my beard.  I shouted "no!"  I shouted "this is not happening" over and over and over.  For many seconds it was all I could say.  Every part of me felt like it was coming unseamed.

I was in shock for two days.

I didn't know what to say to myself or anyone else.  I didn't know what to believe.  I slept.  When I woke I did not move.  While I stayed frozen I tried to sleep until I did.  When I was not sleeping I tried to.  When I was sleeping I waked with a recurring nightmare every handful of minutes I could forget.  Terror stricken.  It was not real.  I was in shock.

Waking, I looked at my hand and it was not mine.  It was a raw thing.  It stank.  The smell of it was raw meat opened two days too late.  Sour and slimy and sticking to everything it touched.  Blood oozed and wept from its every divide.  It was a scene in that movie that you cannot watch start to finish because it turns your stomach just enough to make your eyes cross and tinfoil rattle in your mouth until you are too sick to stand.  For some time, waking and looking at it and having its smell fill my nostrils so close to my face and knowing that if I lifted my blanket enough to look down at my leg I would see a sea monster colored in a sickly greenish yellow full of lint, cat fur, exudate, and blood scab as far as light can carry, I would sweat and convince myself if I just lied still it would heal itself fine like a rug burn.

On the third day I threw up.  60 some odd hours in bed hydrating with only a two litre of Barq's root beer I happened to toss over there before deciding to make food before bed took it's toll.  Waking up the third day for the twentieth time in that period, pain spiking, and the odor of raw flesh beside my head, unable to shake it away and unable to cut it off, took its toll.  I wretched.

Rolls of heaves began working their way along my spine.  I began to scramble with my good left hand to make sure my face was pointed toward empty floor space instead of mattress, pillow, or wall.  I could not walk.  Wherever the projectile went, it had to be somewhere I would be able to lie near without getting it into open wounds.  I succeeded and ralfed, sickened by the furious turbulent grotesquery of my own body parts.

On the fourth day I came to grips with what would become my new modernity.  Without health insurance, there was no one to fix me except me.  I tried to walk and succeeded.  I pissed.  In my own toilet.  Deep brown syrup.  I found my fridge.  There was food,  I walked to my sink.  There was water.  I drank and drank and drank.  I pulled food and food and left arm's full of tupperware and placed on my night stand.  I found my cubby of strange and sudden items and found my scarification kit and breathed a sigh.  Relief, joy, love for the friend who came over prepared for a one time dual scarification incident I ribbed him for (coming over prepared) that he left with me.  With a little improvisation I was able to repurpose the kit to cover the open wounds enough to return to bed on track to recovery instead of on rails to infection.

Days went by like barges trying to force their way over harbor reefs.  The stench of my hand continued to get to me as I left it bare with the kit nearby.  The flesh continued to sweat and the swelling did not go down.  Slicing it off became an option.  I could not sleep with any fidelity.  I could not rest and when I was awake the pain I felt was more than anything near the throb I felt inside my skull when I fractured my jaw.  It was more than anything I felt when I fell down stairs or was in my second car accident or slipped off of the odd side of a hand rail and landed on the concrete bordering the stairs beside a 21 foot decent from a porch to a sidewalk with a hill between us.  I wanted to cut it off as the bare flesh continued to weep that slimy clear goo.  Cut it off!  Cut it off!

I wrapped it.  I wrapped it.  Healing began.  The recurring nightmare, the recurring dream continued.  I was able to make bandages and while it healed I was able to order in specialized products for attending to burns.  I researched for days whiles my leg and hand and arm stuck to my bed sheets.  Every time I tried to move, they stuck to me.  Belief set.  "If I don't move while I'm waiting for these products to arrive, there is no way it can get infected because it is sealed by the plastic fabric so further movement will only create more problems and possible amputation."  I had to figure out a way to urinate.

And I did.  Three weeks in.  My neighbors stopped by to see if I was okay.  I still could not leave the bed for any sort of extended period.  Dropping my burned hand below my heart produced an incredible throbbing pain the likes of I have never felt.  To put the sensation in perspective: do you know when recommendations say to keep the limb elevated?  Imagine that every time you are lying flat on your back that limb crosses a plain.  Now imagine that plain is wherever your heart is located.  Now imagine that every time that limb crosses south of that plain you instantly feel like it is about to burst apart as though a truck tire, connected to a 3/4 ton truck, is rolling over it and if you do not raise it above that plain IT WILL BURST INTO HAMBURGER MEAT.  Yes.  That.  Now imagine that while you are trying to find a comfortable way to lie in bed and sleep.  Now imagine that happens instantly for 18 days to everything from your elbow up and your knee down!

Coming in to something close to normal.  I hope that was coherent.   How else can we survive?

The pain remains.  It feels indescribable though I've done my best.

People you knew before look at you differently.  More so than your scarification. They look at you as though there is something contagious about you.  The root of your being is love for animals.  Perhaps they should.

As I've healed and become a human being again through the last weeks, looking at my hand and my leg, I almost feel like I am wearing a human costume.  All of the skin was flash fried off of my hand save for my palm.  The skin underneath each one of my digits and my palm is original and up to date.  Looking at it, seeing it clinging to the rest of my flesh, it is out of place.  I want to peel it off and it will not go.   It will not go away.  There is no transistion between the old, the original, and the new.  It is stark.  If you shake my right hand you will feel the transition in the form of many tiny spikes where the original skin meets the new.  Where the rough and weathered meets the baby smooth; fingers crossed bounds, hands clasped in a firm grasp.

I still find pieces of skin around my apartment.  It is disgusting.  It is revolting.  Vomit climbs through my body and I know I have to pick that part of me up and put it in a garbage can and it is...   ....   ....    ..... ..........................  I know I can go on.  I know I will.  I know I have to.  It hurts.

It hurts.

It hurts.

It hurts.  


Fuck.  It hurts so much and I know I have to go on and it just fucking hurts so much.  I want to shake it off.   I want to be able to shake it off.   The pain is .................  ugh.  I know I'll beat it.  I think part of the pain it gives me is that I didn't have a choice.  And now I have to wear a permanent and exceptionally visible reminder of how I didn't have a choice through the 24 years of my life my Dad destroyed myself.  I broke away from that, finally.  It took cutting my face apart to see.  To finally split his noose.  Now I have to wear the scars of chance and love right along with them.   It hurts.  It fucking hurts.  It wasn't supposed to be this way.  I have to wear it.  I will and have and will continue to do so.
















I am happy to close this chapter.  If I didn't talk about it I would still find myself living in it months, maybe years, from now.




At least now,

at least now,

we can get back to comedy, true tragedy (instead of misfortune), and stories untold in fiction.  Close this book and open a new.  Carry on, soldier.  How many times do I have to change?  How many times do I have to be changed?  People already look at me so many different ways from what I am.  And they will look at me differently again.

Ever becoming.

We have been patient.  We will still.

You thought you new hell.  It was one of many.

It was a long month.  Come back home, darling.  The worst is over.  You may have set a new ten.  Many, most, if not all, is lost in translation, however-   -there's still a lot of work to do.  Do not quit on me and I will not quit on you.

/////Bjork x Deathgrips - "Thunderbolt" fourteen birth of the painted dinosaur.   Molt.

When Is Enough

The difficulty of motivation is obvious to anyone who has bothered to write, or paint, or draw, or work, or invest any part of themselves in an activity or pursuit that is painful, uncomfortable, or plain not easy.

When is enough far enough?  What do I want?  What do I want to accomplish?  What do I need?  What can I disallow myself?  What must I disallow myself?  When I was younger, growing up through early adulthood, I heard so many "no"s.  Everyone and every system telling me what I can not do, where I could not go, who I could not speak to, when I must disappear.  Molded and shaped by the enclosure, dreams fade.  Fade until they're forgotten because it hurt too much to bring it back into consideration every day, every week, every year, to see that not only was I no closer to anything I set out to do to satisfy my soul and mind, but I was further from it than I was the year before.  The mind falling apart.  The costs of keeping it together steadily rising.  People telling you again and again what your ceiling is, not out of a fear of what I could do, but out of a strange compassion for seeing the war fought inside to maintain a level of sanity and "normal" against mental disorders eating away at the fringes of my consciousness.

Can I be content now?  What else do I want?  To be left alone.  There is still a lot of work to do to arrive there.  That may be the only ultimate goal.  To be left alone with the things living inside my head and a few animals to keep me company.  People are out of the question.  They can be trusted, but they are out of the question as quarters draw closer and closer.  There is not enough space now.  That is what I need.  I suppose a bit of both.  Can I be content now?  As long as I can avoid hurting myself too intensely, too viciously, I won't need health insurance.  I will likely only live to 60 or so.  Would it be that far a leap of madness to arrive to that end 15 years early?  No.  Would it be foolish to drag my feet to that end 15, 20, 30 years beyond?  Absolutely.  Don't be absurd.

I can hardly maintain a conscious coherent line of action for 12 hours because I have to lie in bed for 12 hours because I can't sleep for more than two hours at a time before I wake up and need an hour to get back to sleep.  To achieve an eight hour work day, I need four hours to prepare and four to undo the damages, eat, unpack the interactions, bathe, and prepare for sleep.  Every where I look I am losing time in human maintenance that is impossible to make up elsewhere inside the sweep of the clock.  Until I melt down, lose control, and fall apart in a heap of wails, tears, and broken tissue, begging for an end to the insanity of trying to fit myself into these chains of events for money.

How long do you keep smashing your own extremities with a peen hammer before you wake up and decide this is as far as I am willing to go and I am going to learn to live in this tiny cage and make it work because I know I or some around me will die if I try to reach any further.  Life is long.  Many people can race along it's rivers.  I am not one of those people.  I've got no use for your money.  I wish I had no use for your money, is more accurate.  I suppose that is where I am heading.  Retirement is another name for being left alone to leave life in peace and enough isolation to prevent anyone around you from being hurt and to be able to let myself live among the shadows in my head openly and happily with everything I need to survive until my body fails.  Retirement is a pipe dream.  I'll find another way.

When is enough?  When I have my own paid off house in the middle of a thickly wooded wilderness or some cottage at the end of a one lane drive to the vanishing point of a horizon plain?  When I've found a place in the world where I can not be found?  A place to hide and mend and dance with my broken brain and that's all I have to do to continue to see sun's rise?  I don't want to think about it now.  Enough is not yet.  I have to keep chugging along down the damned river, occasionally stopping to fish, at a blisteringly fast (to me) half knot and continue to hope and strive for the best and make due with repairs whenever its engine sputters and dies and hope I don't run out of supplies or the some day passerby who toss me a pipe, wrench, or a handful of wire harness to keep it going until I reach my tributary to one side or the other to glide down and stake claim to a bit of land no one will find for ages after I'm gone.

Who knows when enough is.  I do know I am not close yet and as much as I want now to be that place, it is not.  Wrestling with motivation won't get you killed.  Picking up the hammer eventually will.




///Jon Hopkins - "Candles"

Pushed

All I wanted was a front row seat in what feels like a war and looks nothing like it.  I keep reciting the procedure and double and triple checking equipment, and in the mean seconds ticking by the pilot is sweating marbles trying to keep our helicopter away from flak and small arms fire and the occasional rocket, circling where I need to land once I jump off of the side.  I'm sweating too fearful of what happens after I step out into thin air, but I know what happens.  There's nothing to be afraid of.

Walking into my apartment after getting groceries the long fingered man with the reading glasses glances up and turns around and taps the only skin on his arm not flayed away where a watch was.  Time is of the essence.  I know.  There is not much time to waste.  I know, I know, I know.  Where are you going?  Out, don't follow me.  You forgot your wallet.  Thank you.

I suppose, a sort of writer's block for persons who don't get writer's block?

Consider this your gentle, two palmed, straight armed shove.  You know what has to be done.  Pull the trigger.

I worry sometimes that it won't make sense.  I worry now if it's not good.  If the entire pursuit has been a waste.  Why poetry?  What is locking up inside you?  It's nothing.  Absolutely nothing and you know it.  Don't be afraid, you've just had your eyes closed for a few months.  Listening to the air and the land and space and people eating each other alive and giving birth and dying and sleeping and breathing and talking and talking and it's not so bad if you'd only open your eyes standing on the ledge of the gunship.  Make sense out of chaos.  Or chaos out of chaos.  Make sense of it later.  Every thought lost to time is one less beacon, one less point of reference, one less story, one less epic, one less chapter, one less relationship you could have brought into this world from your travels.  One less love.  Do it for you.  Do it because you can love you and that's where it all starts.  Come clapping toward the bright pink smoke flare while the shells fly.  I'll be back to pick you up sooner than you have time to think to ask "where did you go?"




///Sylvan Esso - "Hey Mami"    higher resolution

Simulations, Run Times and Control

Simulation is an art form.  Everyone's guilty.  Shut up, you're guilty.  Every compromise is another exhibit, another piece of evidence, but you're nothing wrong for it.  It means that you are reading and absorbing.  Where structure rattling shifts occur are when you've overstepped is all.  That's fine.  If it's not, it should be.  Deception is not an art.  Deception is a skill.  There's a difference.

Simulation is an art form and a means of communication and should be maintained.  Not must be, but should be.  It's a token.  It's a tipped hat.  There is no fault with simulation.  To read, to understand, to emulate, to produce circumstances in which the assumed can thrive, with or without the other's knowledge, is an art and, furthermore, to be absorbed in the simulation wholehearted is to complete it, and to find completion being a crime is simply absurd.  Refuse crime.

To the larger point, bottling sounds of my thoughts through snippets offered through social media is not whoring.  It is simulation refined and semi-successful and semi-failure.  I am comfortable with that and uncomfortable at the same time.  The act, itself, plays directly into the multifacet self.  The concept of conscious faced through planes of a gem cut (or not) through experience and trying to catch the most acceptable light from the most appealing angle not because there is a drive to appeal and appease and assure, because there is, within the contract of citizenship to this planet, a very very important subtext and rule line x, dash alphabet, dot n, that says you can either participate or margin.

The approach to social media is always a tricky one.  Not for offering opportunities for criticism; for offering opportunities for connection.  There is much less value in not offering a front door and at the same time expecting the line to run from there, down to the sidewalk, and around the corner.  A certain amount of simulation must happen.  Consider it something akin to taking the temperature of a moment.  Consider it too, an argument that specialized and targeted results diminish the quality of the simulation each and every time that impetus is to be obeyed and deviation will be cause for changes not, surface, necessary.

Hunting for ghosts should be saved for television.  Things go bump in the night.  Dealing with things that go bump in the night should not be necessary, and is.  I'm not celebrating it.  Have lust for the ones you don't dare.  Few things truly scare me in life.  It is part production.  Part assumption of past fears like putting on clothes so those around you can feel more comfortable being around and talking the same way you can talk and fearing the same way you can fear.  If there is a subtext, a foot note, to the experience it is that I saw someone who truly scared me because I never laid eyes on it before and it has me rattled because I never want to see it again.

I saw, for lack of a better term, a ghost.  I have no idea how to explain it.  It was not a ghost or a spirit.  It was not an after image burned onto my retinas so I happened to wake up two hours later and blink a lot and rub the corner of the eye snot away and coughed to make sure I was awake.  It was something I hope to never see again and it burned me on the inside simply to lay eyes on it.

I got out of bed and walked around it and it kept saying "you can fly in your sleep" and I do not know what it meant.  You can fly in your sleep.  You can fly in your sleep.  It only came up to near chest height.  I kept walking around it to make sure it was three dimensional.  I was running tests, mental tests, to be sure that I was not asleep and that it was not a figment and it kept talking and did not hold the usual humanoid, warped and not, shapes or the usual animal, warped and not, shapes.

To pin my psychological misgivings current on its existence feels like a cop out.  It's there though, watching me and I desperately would like to do something about it.  I don't want to sleep.  I don't want to sleep knowing it can enter my apartment with no sound.  Where did you come from?!  Go away!  Go away!  I have not seen it since its first appearance, but I feel it.  It makes my skin itch.  How do I kill you?

I've grown comfortable with some of them to the point where I can say hello, nod, and continue on.  They're almost like family or pets or even, I'd go so far as to say, fixtures like lamps or hat racks and sometimes they yap, but it's getting easier to ignore them.  Not easier, but second nature through strict training.  My breath is still snatched away now and then when they are where they are not supposed to be and the agreement that I assume is broken because they and my own paths cross without warning and my face is not our face and they are.

I don't want to go to sleep.  I am afraid it will visit again.  I am much more afraid that it is a returned.  I'm not prepared to deal with that.  My techniques and knowledge have advanced enough to protect against signs and travelers and after images and beckonings and name calling and interpolations and ringers and false alerts and I ...  ... don't know it and I cannot be caught engaging it and .........  I should not be talking about it.  I have to.  For record.  To help me better.  As far as I go.  The lights will be kept on.  Fear no man.  It is, this I know, no man.

I had an odd dream.  I dreamt I had a sex change surgery.  Except the Earth, this planet, was so far advanced, or smoothed, that all outward adornment went by the wayside.  To the point where nature and tech apexed to an uncomfortable coexistence.  To the point where every injury, every modification, needed no bandage and had no boundary for it's obviousness.  We were sitting at a hookah bar and passing a cigarette between each of ourselves and someone commented that my penis looked better where it was and we railed for a minute and then got home sick and wished we'd telecommuted to the outing instead because we liked our new body a lot, but no one stuck up for us so we smoked some more instead.  Then we blinked and when our eyelids opened we were not on sand world again.

We were walking down a street where each and every person walked too, fully clothed, but the backs of their heads were all torn out, blown out, by something.  Grapefruit sized holes.  Deer slugs?  Their eyes were fine.  Their faces for the most part.  Whatever went in must have gone through their mouths.  Everything smelled like take out food Bronx tenements.  It was queasy.

I'm not saying it's the return of the monster.  It's not.  I am afraid.  I am dreaming.  I am sleep walking.  I am not sleep walking.  You are not sleep walking.  You are reading this.  Pause here.  Whatever it was you were thinking about doing, pause here for at least five minutes, but not more than ten.  Whatever it was, it will be back.  You can handle it.  Do not be afraid.  No crying.  No hiding.  If it can get in, it can do more and it has chosen not to.  Do not talk to it.  Do not engage it.  Do not engage it.  Do not engage it.  Do not name it.  Do not listen to it.  Listen without hearing.  Always remember.

I am trying to remember, trying very hard, to remember the name of the one I gave away to a friend and the price (I do remember that torture) I paid when he called him through text messages.  It needn't be repeated.  Once was enough.  Learn from mistakes.  To this day I do not think he realizes how far open I had to be to do that and how stupid I was to do that.  Learn from mistakes.

I am trying very hard to remember and I can't and you know what?  I am happy it is struck from memory.  I am happy I can review the pages of notes and review the eye reel and find no hints.  It means I did something right.  I remember the weeks and the forced in closeness and needing to give for what I received and splitting cigarettes on the balcony and looking at the enormous clockwork gears ticking over behind the tree line near Bloomfield and the memory tape ends there and I do not want to discover what was buried there ever again.




///The Grid - "Crystal Clear (Clear Water Revival Mix)"  Henry remembered his mother and preferred not to.

A Friendly Reminder

I was reminded today of what the creative process actually is and also informed or reinformed of what I've been doing.  Kind of a reanimation of what the mission really is and continues to be:

first and foremost and always foremost

We are a blueprint.  We are a map.  A map of the backwoods to go back to personally and also a map forwards for others in similar circumstances and also others who do not know what their circumstances are just yet, that they may not make the same mistakes again and also for the selves that they may understand each other and cooperate efficiently and do less damage to each other while they make their meetings and gravitas and coalesce instead of collide.

second

we are an outlet so that we do not make mistakes heinous and lesser, but mistakes nonetheless.   Travel comes from the front and history is written from behind.  Collision comes when the head and eyes go sidewinder.  There's nothing wrong with telling a good story.  There is something wrong with living a good story.  There is something very wrong with living the same story twice.  There is something very very wrong with not allowing a pop valve in the schematics so the engine does not burn itself into a solid chunk of slag.

third

is what you believe in.  There must be reminders to guide the way toward belief and above all belief systems is a belief in the fellow man.  There is no reason for extinction, not now, not ever, and I wish I understood that sooner.  Caveat being that there are some lined up for it.  Some exceptions.  Though they are very very few, they still exist.  It's an almost bulletproof belief.  Almost bulletproof is as close as can be had, so we'll take it.

fourth

this and her children are outlets.  The majority of the work is still unsung.  This is a manual and the parts and pieces are still, for the most part, in the parts bin.  This is the parts bin, as are her children.  There may or may not be a masterwork coming down the assembly line, but these are the parts.  These are the parts.  These are the parts.  Say it with me: slag.  This is not a summation.

fifth

the real work is done by day.  By night we are exhaust fumes.  The output of what comes from days of combustion and fire and fuel.  Never forget the process.  Never forget that what comes of work unrelated is a photo album and what comes of work ignited can and must be refined.

sixth

never forget the first.  Never forget where the bounds end and further expansion is absolutely mandatory.  Never forget the jail.  Never forget the cell.  Never forget, however pleasant, the yard still exists and the fences are still there no matter how far off they are and how easy it is to miss them, though you need binoculars to see them.  Never forget why the motor does what it does and that you are connected, whatever disagreement it is, objection you have, to it.  Never forget, but also do not fail to work with it, embrace it, and modify to the best of ability.  Because that will be, that failure will be, the end of the game.

Creation will always come from focus, sweat, a clean mind, organization, a healthy garbage heap, and a clean slate near or far.  However warm the fire is, you've nothing until you've walked away to build a pit of your own.  If it takes days, months, years, take the time to move stones and build that pit.  Until you take that time... it's just another fire.





///Bjork - "Hyper Ballad"  ...we live on a mountain...

Giddy Up

I've been trying to chart my work books, but I don't want to see them.  At all.  Fantastic difficulty.  I did the first class and the reminder came up to do the second class and I couldn't bring myself to do it.  Part of it is horror.  Part of it is blatant stupidity.  Part of it is just not wanting to know how much further I am going to have to work to get back to zero.

I just want to put my fist through something.  Anything!  Not even through, but just break my hand.  Null it.  But I need my hands, both of them.  And I need the ability to ambulate.  I need my knees and my elbows and I have to protect them the same way people protect their investments.  It breaks my heart sometimes knowing that I can't do what I need to do.  It makes me cry a lot.  I won't go to "it's not fair" because it's just a fact.  I could probably cut a finger off.  I think I would save it.  Maybe eat it.  Cook it somehow like a ham hock.  Stew it or something.  It's tantalizing and aggravating because I know where the knuckles join and have cut limbs apart before but I don't trust my left hand to operate the scissors on my right hand.  Maybe just the pinky.

Gauging my pain threshold.  I'm still not sure where it is exactly and I probably shouldn't be losing sleep about it, but I am.  I think I get that from my father.  How far are you willing to go before you jump to get what you need.  Would I have to cauterize it myself?  Probably.  I don't know why I need to do these things, but I do and its getting more powerful and harder to swallow it down between suggestions.  I don't know what that means!  It scares me.  It's getting harder to pretend to be normal.  Normative?  Baseline.  Nullification.  Talked to Martin about that for a while.  It was a good conversation.

Relying more and more on emulation and I'm afraid I will be found out.  Not about being gay or anything that trivial, but being found out about being a fucking psychopath.  I want blood all the time, I don't care how it comes.  I need help.  I need assistance and I keep saying I can run this car until the wheels fall off, but I've been rolling on brake discs forever.  So many years.

It would be easier if I was not aware of the degeneration, but I think a piece of the awareness has lent itself to a belief that I'm making it up and even as I'm speaking I know it sounds contrived.  It isn't.  It's motor and I know less and less how to change the fucking oil.  I don't know what to do about it.  I know where to go, but you better believe I'm not going there.  Like I need more debt, don't make me laugh.  I'll spit ice tea everywhere.  I'm not getting interned again!  No!  I will never put down the ax!  If you want it out of my hands you better be fucking prepared to take it from me.

I'm not a gun, but I will put one between your eyes and kiss you while I do it if you think it was going to be that easy.  Don't touch me.  Do not fucking touch me.  Ever.  I will break your fingers one by one while I sit on your chest so you don't move too much.  Escalation.  Take the escalator back down.

I know what's wrong with me, but I need a checkup and I don't know where to get one without the internment trap.  I'm not doing that again.  We're not doing that again.  Just handle it. Just grab your ears and pull up your socks and eat it.  Life hasn't been all that bad to me.  I'm just tired of having to emulate to squeak by.  Doing it by the skin of my teeth and I'm pretty sure some people have started to see through it so I have to work harder at it because the people that I do love I love dearly and want to keep them and want them to keep me to and the last thing that should happen is giving them a reason.

It's tough.  Everything worth having is hard.  Is a myth.  Perpetuated by people who think "difficult" is possession in the material sense or the kid rearing sense.  Everything worth having is hard in the interpersonal intrapersonal sense.  Having ground you do not need to give inside your skull is worth having.  Maintaining relationships with the people you care about and trust is worth having.  Put in work, no doubt, but put in secondary work too.




///Amon Tobin - "Back from Space"  I wish I could fly, but not just to the atmosphere, to the stars.  I want to explore the Oort cloud and be the first man to land on an asteroid and be out there in the zero cold and see the sun without atmospheric interference.  I want to see Jupiter up close at all costs and I want to die out there.  But I'm stuck here.  And have to keep coming back to this fucking planet every time I wake up.  Bullshit.

Note Taking and Big Wednesday and Curtains (Question Mark)

Here we are. All of us together, staring down the barrel of big Wednesday. It feels good to be, all of us, facing the same direction. It's like that scene from Seven Samurai. A rare union. It feels good to be all together. It's like standing on the viewing deck of a skyscraper and the entire city looks like a fold out map with colored streets and little geometric bits of color to show the landmarks and it's even better because all of your friends are there and it's not about getting lost in the moment as much as it is about the moment being an extension of the years you've spent with these people and the fact that together you all see it the same way, but spun enough to make everything everyone is saying worth each second of hearing.

The note taking at work is going well. I do think some people are beginning to assume that I am texting some girl friend somewhere (HAH) and oddly enough, me being the hardest worker there, they've started calling me a slacker. It doesn't bother me. What does bother me is that if I ever tried to explain that I am taking notes to use later in my compositions and poetry and fiction they would laugh, not believe me, and then continue to call me a slacker. So I won't explain until or unless I am directly confronted about my phone activities. Worst comes to worst I'll just have to start using paper. But my handwriting sucks.

Also I bought curtains. And by curtains I mean six bright yellow table cloths on sale in the Easter display for a dollar each. What I plan on doing is writing two inch tall font prose on them from edge to edge, cutting slats into them that are each about two to three inches wide, and then taking them up for window curtains. The way the sun hits my place in the mornings it's going to look amazing, I promise. If you came to visit once they're done, it'll probably take a day or two or maybe even a week to get all that writing done first, you'll love waking up here as much as I do.

Something silly funny happened today though. When I got home from work this morning I went to use the microwave to heat up some wind-myself-down-and-sleep-soundly greasy cheesy yummy food and I couldn't enter the time on the microwave control panel. So I'm jamming the buttons and finally I bend down to see what the little display is saying. Thought process:

"Aw, what the hell?? Who keeps leaving time on the microwave!? I can't use the damn thing if there's time left on it!"

Then I realized that no one could have done it, but me. Then I realized no one could have done it, but me, because I'm the only one who lives here. Then I realized that was a good thing.

I didn't do the whole moment justice there, but there were two paths of discovery that joined up in a single goof troop smile that made the morning pretty enjoyable. I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but blunt objects can solve problems pretty good too.

///DJ Adam Freeland - "Big Wednesday" This song makes me wish there was a God. It makes me think of sitting on the sun facing side of a dune by the great lakes and feeling the Earth breathing against the back of my neck like someone in love and I'm killing time and picking grass until I can go play in the water and meet the sun out by the buoys before nightfall. It also makes me think of riding. I need a car or motorcycle. Not necessarily to get where I'm going, but just to go out and drive and feel the veins of highway and the wind up my sleeves and my nose and the motor beneath my seat. I love the rhythm of motion and sea.